


Dead City of N’Gesh

by ImperiousStag4



Category: Lovecraft - Fandom
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-16 14:04:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20834678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImperiousStag4/pseuds/ImperiousStag4
Summary: An ancient city located within the Arabian desert once forgotten by the world of men plays host to an old and cosmic force who once dwelt dreaming for a thousand years, only to be disturbed by those in search of an old friend who saw to seek it out.Will they find what they’re looking for?





	Dead City of N’Gesh

Do not think of me as mad when I tell you the tale of N’Gesh, for I have long been investigated by psychologists and medicinal practitioners in whom I have voluntarily devoted my trust in clarifying my sanity. There is a strangeness out there in Saudi sea of sand, and I know above all that it is not the product of madness which many archaeologists and scholars claim, but rather a cosmic and naturalistic sentience which holds about it the ability to do that we reference only to the hands of gods. It is real, I tell you; even after sixteen years, the sounds of the Dead City still haunt me in my dreams, and usher noises of the most peculiar combination of syllables which only recite one specific sentence I have heard over a thousand times:

“N’Gesh ul’ Infitius” 

The Saudis of Doha were not at all welcoming to we Brits who sought knowledge above understanding in deserts which men should not blindly wander. Many a time were we warned: us three archaeologists who had come to the Arabian shores in search of a friend and fellow colleague, Professor Alfred Dunburn, who disappeared only two months earlier. In his vacant office, we with wise minds found in his diary the product of a legendary dead city which he had heard rumours of in Africa by shamans, as well as monks in china; and he even discovered knowledge in the world of the occult, where satanists chose to favour the horns above antlers. Each had told him the world N'Gesh did not stem from any mortal tongue or mind, but rather something very old and very different. Something that monks and shamans and satanists spoke of but never bowed their heads to or idolised. Idolisation is recognition, and recognition is influence; and influence, according to Dunburn, was its power. 

A Doha Arabian native by the name of Ali was paid handsomely to take us across this desert, though he came to agree with great reluctance. Doctor Daniel Hitchcock, our accompanying colleague, practically forced a handful of shillings into Ali's hand and shoved it deep within his pocket; and then he took off his very watch and stuffed it in Ali's other. Arabians are a kind and hospitable people, so the reluctance to take us was strange, to say the least. But Ali soon accepted, and together we drove under the scorching sun to where this city supposedly dwelt. Along the way, we passed through lonesome villages and squalid towns out there in the sandy wastes, all of which were dotted with a strange symbol smeared in tar across the walls. Ali refused to tell us of its concept; but what we saw of its design was drawn hastily by Professor Geoffrey Michelson of Ebonmir University in Epping as we sat in the back of the tattered truck beneath the desert sun. It portrayed a stag’s skull, strangely, whose likeness unified with some form of black squid. Its tendrils laced the bone almost obsessively on the walls, but Michelson’s version was sketched roughly along a bumpy road, not very pleasant to the eyes in its scrawn form. When he showed it to us of his own accord, we looked silently at its daunting form. I wondered what significance a stag’s skull would have out there. In the desert. In the heat. In the midst of nowhere and seemingly somewhere very important.

We would soon come to find out. 

Come the hour when the sun was no longer present in the skies, Ali brought the truck to a halt in the middle of nowhere. We hopped off onto the cold sands in our confusion and gazed out to the vast plains of endless grains to which nothing in any cardinal point possessed something of significance. “Here,” Ali said in his broken English. “No further. N’Gesh — east. Follow stars.” 

And with that, Ali was soon to be a distant dot driving back west, something we should have done ourselves. Alas, we marched east as told, to where the world seemed to change like the night sky further we progressed. Above us, the stars took on an oddly form I believed to be a mirage of the heat, though I was not the only one witnessing this astrological barbarity. The stars huddled and aligned, slowly, but definitively, in the eastern sky until a stag’s skull stared down at us in the black crown of space. I was certain that this was the product of us moving towards them, in turn curving the world, but coincidence was not existent in association to the macabre. These things happened for a reason, as we soon found what birthed in their alignment.

We came atop a hill and stared down into a crater. Crowned within it was a pyramid as black as midnight glazed with moonlight, erecting hundreds of meters up into the night sky. How we failed to see its crown before was befuddling, but we did not question the strangeness too long. Michelson scribbled something in his diary, and then we descended towards the pyramid, swallowed into the shadow of its great form until we found a yawning doorway of darkness twenty-feet up and sixteen feet wide. Its center was black, screaming horrors in silence. Winds swept out of its dark, and we all took a step back. The pillars that made this doorway were carved with barbaric curvatures and symbolism of something old and very otherworldly, yet we had seen them before in Dunburn’s diary back in his office, and he had translated them himself without evidence of his ability to translate:

“In His hand, we find our quaking nightmare; a chasm of ecstasy and barbarity in which all tidings fold to His desire. Suhtagu-Mir waits further in N'Gesh, dreaming.” 

Alfred had only translated that word in his notes: Suhtagu. It meant Suttagu in Japanese; and in Japanese, Suttagu meant Stag. Stag.

Stag.

Torches could not penetrate this lingering darkness from the outside. When we all finally stepped in, we could see nothing of the desert behind us, as if a black veil had fell behind us in which no light could waver. Once inside, we marched unknowingly through a great hallway of shadows, ruined stone and slabs of white marble carved into the walls. These forms of marble were strange, cold as ice, carved with images of a stag without the presence of tendrils. It appeared majestic, as if it needed to be depicted grand to whomever chiseled it. Depictions of men bowed and knelt before it, its eyes carved deep into the marble until shadows swallowed them black. Grand, but still very daunting. It’s significance was lost on us few men. 

But we would soon come to find out.

Beyond the hallway sat a room, vast and spacious, circular in its design. Mirrors seized the moonlight through crevices in the pyramid walls and set the room ablaze with its rays of reflection, even though torches sat across the walls, ignited not by us. The dancing flames of braziers in the strange breeze swayed shadows over the likeness of tombs embedded into the walls. Tombs, I say, but they were of men. Dead and ancient men with their arms folded across their chests, and stag skulls crowning their shoulders. Moving closer to them, they glazed with moisture, though I dared not to touch. To disturb the dead this night was not of my intentions; and yet, it was of our colleague’s, Doctor Damien Ricardo. His fingers traced the stag skull in which he stood before, and he immediately jumped back in a shiver before screaming frantically enough to drop his torch. Its bulb shattered with the glass, and its light perished. Damien scurried back until he fell onto his hind, scratching his arms and face and neck violently like one would amidst being attacked by a swarm of hornets. Michelson and I eventually quelled his moment of madness enough for him to speak, but what he spoke we all wished not to hear. He said it saw it — the thing that laid dreaming further inside. Laid waiting, as it had done for over two thousand years, for men like us to come prowling in its quaking nightmare of a tomb. 

Like Dunburn had.

And then the walls came alive after two thousand years of sleep. The dead man of the wall who Damien had disturbed peeled away from his ancient bed of stone, and he stood ten foot tall as a hulking figure of rotten flesh and horror. He was a man, at one point, because his erection was decayed, but definite, like all true men of a morning who awoke, minus the black rot. Around his neck was a necklace of bronze chains in which a pendant lined like the letter V sat idle against his rotten skin. His arm reached out and seized Damien by the throat, broad antlers forcing myself and Michelson aside before they could cut at us. The figure elevated Damien up into the air, and it effortlessly caved in his face with a single headbutt. Blood gushed from the streaks and splinters of bone penetrating Damien’s once old face, and the dead man threw his corpse across the room like he were a rugby ball. Its skull harboured no eyes, yet I knew this thing had the ability to stare at us through those sockets of darkness. Looking into them, I heard a thousand screams morphed into one. Like the bellows of a stag penetrating my mind. It turned to pursue me, and so me and Michelson fled. 

We dove through the darkness of an opposing doorway until the light behind us vanished. The hallway in which we pursued was, too, dotted with marble slabs engraved with associations to the stag, and we found nothing of safety or peace waiting for us when we conquered the pyramid’s lengthy hall. No, what we found was yet another room, only this one was set for something royal. Something divine, perhaps, and something terrifying. The walls were only of marble, white, with blue streaks riding the smoothness of the elegant geology like veins. This room had a certain hum which moved through us, and it lured our eyes to the theriocephalic form of a figure we must consider to be real after what you come to read further along. It, too, was fashioned of marble. A hulking monolithic squatting thing whose shoulders crowned a stag skull like the dead man, and a body which possessed the likeness of human. A waterfall of long, frozen hair fell from beneath the skull onto this figure’s shoulders, glittered with silver sparkles like stars. This idol stood at least fifty feet tall and thirty feet wide, settled beneath a white marble arch in which symbols rode the curves as barbaric and twisted lines. 

This was it, I thought. The depiction of what Saudi men and women smeared across their walls. Tentacles curved its arms in frozen forms of marble, yet they dripped molten silver over the marble floor. In the palm of a broad fingered hand sat a sphere, perfectly round and dark like the pyramid we were present in. It was made of onyx, I believed, before I reached out and caressed it. It came alive with a white glow, signifying that it was in fact hollow. But the light was precise, narrow like a white dagger. . . slanted like a serpentine eye, and I knew it to be looking right back at me. Into me. Through me. What I was, and what I would come to be. In turn, I saw into its design, and my mind fell ablaze with fields beneath a twilight sky of purple and black in which thunder clapped and wind hissed in humidity. No longer was I within the Dead City of N'Gesh, but another world entirely. A world, I say, but it felt not like a planet. Somehow I knew it wasn't somewhere physical; but instead it was the product of some space between spaces; a void which sunk deep into the unknown. I stood upon a field of black-bladed grass curving without the presence of wind. These blades were long and slender, sharp as they pricked at my ankles. They all curved in the direction ahead of me, to where a black tower erected up towards the twilight skies. A horrid, jagged pillar of darkness, this tower was. Its summit crowned seven points encircling a black mass of spherical aurora in which a silver, serpentine eye stared down at me. Across this alien field I stood upon, a stag opposed me. Its fur was white, its antlers plentiful. It was broad, majestic and beautiful, and yet I knew its beauty to be false. Its eyes shun like silver starlight, narrow and unwavering to me. And while this thing was silent in its brooding stare, I somehow knew that while this thing depicted itself a stag of our world, I was only basking upon what my mind could comprehend. And through the exchanged stare, I did in fact see what this creature was. What it had been, and what it would come to be. 

This thing came not from any heaven or hell, but rather the stars. The space between them - the black seas of infinity in which no light ever shone. At one point I saw it sleeping, and then it was suddenly awake. Its desire was to spread its influence beyond the void in which it was once dormant, and it came to Earth in the form of a star to establish an authority to the men and women of the time in which it came. Men long dead built the Dead City of N'Gesh; women were sacrificed for sexual appeasement. It didn’t mate with these women; He doesn’t like to mate with just anyone. Gods, I just typed ‘He’. I won’t tear this page from my typewriter and restart; I already fed into its existence sixteen years ago. In N’Gesh, where H— it sits dreaming. 

From what I know the stars swallowed N’Gesh when out of alignment so that this thing and all its dead men could sleep until the day came when the world might once again be ready for them. But now the stars were right; that awakening was nigh. After my visions quelled, my eyes returned to Michelson pointing a gun to me. He said for me to cast the black stone back onto the floor so that we may leave this Dead City while it was still dead. But I could not part with the stone. My arm raised to cast it, but my fingers locked around its jagged form. Michelson threatened to shoot me, but his threats were short lasting when the dead when a hooded man brought down an axe upon his shoulder and sunk deep. Michelson’s arm barely hung by the flesh as he descended towards the marble to die; but in doing so I could look upon his murderer with ill-intent. Such intent didn’t last, however; for the man I looked at was Dunburn.

He wasn’t old, though. When I last saw him was in November of last year, 1888. Two weeks before his sixtieth birthday. Now, however, he seemed to have been set back thirty years, though his eyes were very dull and greyish. His robes were no more vibrant: they sat as a ragged grey which hung loosely over his thin body. His face was devoid of emotion, though his skin had never looked healthier. Silence sat between us a good thirty seconds before he suddenly spoke to me. 

“You finally came,” he said. “I knew you would, my old friend. How old you are — how old you look. But you don’t need to be old; for in His hand, we find our quaking nightmare; a chasm of ecstasy and barbarity in which we can serve Him eternally and revel in the rewards he bestowed upon us.”

I asked Dunburn who He was, and he simply looked to the alter of this squatting monolithic man-thing looming over us. Then he smiled. “Do not fear the Antlered One; he is a saviour of the world. Serve him, my old friend, like I do; for what sits in his hand never rots. What is bound to him is never unbound; and when we die, we never truly stay dead. All is eternal in his embrace, just like N’Gesh is.”

And then Dunburn peeled the robes away from his chest; and I saw that he had a black sphere similar to the one in my hand embedded into his torso. A serpentine eye of starlight looked sharply at me through the onyx; and it narrowed when I took a step back. 

That was the last time I saw Dunburn. I fled shortly after his proposal; and when I finally fled the Dead City’s walls, I saw only the broken pillars of an arch behind me. N’Gesh was gone — swallowed now the starlight was no longer right. Sixteen years later, I still have the black sphere, and its eye still looks to me through the blackness of its form across my desk. I forever hear the whispers of this Antlered One; and I forever dream of quaking nightmares filled with ecstasy and barbarity. I know what it wants, because it has told me. I know what it looks like, because I have seen it. Today is my birthday; and today it told me the stars are right. Candles will not bear a flame in this cold room of mine, but it is alright. I adapted to the dark long ago. The visions and horrors of stags and eldritch things which leave me scarred mentally and physically every time I escape my dreams and nightmares. 

And now there is a scratch, scratch, scratching on my study door. Peace is no more, as I will soon be. The door creaks slowly op

e 

n 

He has

finally   
come for me

ncneneN’Geshlcooneb


End file.
